Socialist Action /January 1999
'A People's History of the United States'
By PAUL SIEGEL
Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present,"
(Revised and Updated Edition). Harper Collins, l995. 675 pp. $16.
Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" sold
more than 350,000 copies in its 1980 edition. Published in a revised and
updated edition in 1995, it passed the 500,000 sales mark. It was also issued
in an abridged teaching edition, and the Public Broadcasting System is now
planning a TV series based on it.
That "A People's History of the United States" has achieved
such a wide readership and is a subject for study is a cause for rejoicing.
For the history by this 75-year-old historian who contributed significantly
to the anti-war and civil rights movements of the l960s and has continued
as a radical activist is like no ordinary academic history.
The aim of "A People's History" is to show the events of U.S.
history from the point of view not of the exploiters but of the exploited-Native
Americans, slaves, the poor, women, and workers. He does not romanticize
them or engage in lamentations of the injustices visited upon them but tells
of their struggles, in which he finds hope for the future.
"A People's History of the United States" can be compared with
A.L. Morton's "A People's History of England." Morton, then a
member of the British Communist Party, published his book in 1934, and it
went through a number of reprintings and editions.
Morton's book contributes frequent new insights into England's history
but, although it pays greater attention to the play of class forces than
conventional histories do, does not functionally differ from them in its
recounting of the doings of the rulers of society. Those are described in
a rather pedestrian way.
Zinn, on the other hand, writes with a vigor that makes it a pleasure
to read. He vividly describes mass struggles, making them come alive by
quoting from those engaged in them words that illuminate their significance.
In a creative synthesis he makes use of specialist studies by young radical
historians who came of age in the 1960s as well as of historical works by
previous generations of radicals and of standard academic histories. These
are given in useful bibliographies for each chapter.
Not only does Zinn tell of what the standard histories omit, he casts
new light on the things they write about. An example is the Jacksonian period.
In high school and elementary textbooks, Andrew Jackson is represented
as the ultimate democrat, a man of the people. Zinn shows him to have been
a slave trader, a perpetrator of Indian massacres, a speculator in land
robbed from the Indians, and an executioner of soldiers who dared to complain
about their conditions.
At a time when, thanks to popular struggle, suffrage was being extended,
Jackson claimed to speak for the common man, but this was mostly rhetoric.
What Zinn his to say about Jackson was brilliantly anticipated by Harry
Braverman, not a professional historian but a leader of the Socialist Workers
Party in its Trotskyist days. He found that Jackson was representative of
the new Southwestern cotton planters, who were more aggressive than the
old Eastern seaboard aristocracy, and fought against the Northern industrialists
by using "a pseudo-democratic movement" that attracted "large
urban and agrarian masses."
Braverman admitted that his analysis was "simplified and schematic."
Zinn, while not quite precise in exploring class relationships, gave flesh
and blood to this analysis through the rich detail he acquired from studies
subsequent to Braverman.
Braverman's two essays on the Jacksonian period were published under
the pseudonym of Harry Frankel in 1946 and 1947 and reprinted in "Essays
in American History" (Pathfinder Press, 1966).
The two chief contributors to this volume were Braverman and George Novack.
Novack found that the American economy throughout the course of American
history was "a component part of [the] world economy," not a "self-enclosed
organism" or even merely a "microcosm" of the world economy.
Zinn's book does not follow through on this hint. Nevertheless, he does
show in great measure the economic forces that generated the struggles he
chronicles, and his description of these struggles is both revealing and
inspiring. "A People's History of the United States" belongs on
every radical's bookshelf.
Socialist Action /January 1999 |